By David Saitch
Well, this is boring isn’t it?
Under normal circumstances, Hurst Festival would have just finished (and kudos to the Festival team for the sterling efforts they put in to create a Virtual Festival), and we would be eagerly anticipating the start of our landmark tenth, yes you read that right, tenth film season. Our autumn programme would have been published, a new set of NT Live broadcasts lined up, website and app updated, our social media streams would be buzzing and hopefully, as usual, tickets already flying out.
Obviously, we want all that to still happen, and of course it will, but when?
As I have said before, we are currently betting on the start of 2021, but there are no guarantees. Then again, it might happen sooner - unlikely, but who knows? We can only hope. We are ready to act as soon as we are able to in full safety and we are regularly testing the equipment and fine tuning it, to make sure we can start at the drop of a hat, whenever the hat drops.
One question of course, would be what we will screen. We normally screen what we believe to be the best international and independent films that have been released in the previous months, but which haven’t had a big enough release, mixed with overlooked gems and classics. But given the pandemic, there are very few films being released, as production halted on films across the globe back in February.
But don’t worry, there is still a wealth of brilliant cinema available for us to screen. Each year we put a list of films together, then whittle it down to a final programme. Because we have a limited number of screenings available, a lot of films that we could have, perhaps even should have screened get dropped simply because we have to draw a line somewhere. So there are a lot of films we wanted to screen over the last nine years but couldn’t and we can certainly delve into those and put together a terrific season of films.
And, of course, there is an incredible range of amazing films of all kinds from past decades, so there is absolutely no reason why we cannot put together and exciting, entertaining, challenging, thought provoking programme of films.
Fingers crossed it won’t be too long before we can. Stay safe. www.hurstfilms.com